Above: Daly in Stars Reach
Matt Daly's early first-person explorations of Star's Reach, the sandbox MMO from Raph Koster and his company Playable Worlds, have been so intriguing (as featured here last week), I asked him to expand them in this guest post! - WJA
The whole reason many of us work in Games and Virtual Worlds is because of early experiences with wonder.
I grew up deep in the Quake 2 modder community (Loki’s Minions whereya at). As newly minted teens, my childhood BFF and I weren’t hanging at the mall as much as leading guilds, going to war, and fletching arrows or whatever in Telnet MUDS and M59.
Considering we had just been literally playing in literal sandboxes only a few years before (as literal children), this came quite naturally to us.
We didn’t need or care about revenue models or acquisition funnels. All of that sterile product science would come later in our careers and begin to hide some of the original wonder. But, spoiler: hyper-efficiency, liquid content and AI are creating an allergic reaction amongst player communities that’s bringing wonder back, baby (you won’t believe what happens next! 😲)
When Ultima Online launched in 1997, while we worked on haranguing my dad into buying us a 56k connection, BFF and I would sit at my kitchen table and pore over the cloth map of Brittania (right) that came with the UO guidebook. Our master plan (when we had proper internet and could actually play the game) was to overthrow the isle of Magincia, based only on a couple paragraphs about animal taming (which included dragons). Obviously we inevitably hit the reality of constraints that would prevent two children from taking over an entire island in a game millions would play.
The wonder, however, remained. It's followed me almost 30 years later to a pre-alpha MMO called Stars Reach, where I found a team and community who are leaning into the sloppy, undeniably human imperfection of an actual literal sandbox in search of their wonder.
Let’s dive in:
Enter Stars Reach
Stars Reach, in brief, is a Sandbox MMO underpinned by a wildly complex physics simulation system (coined The Cellular Automata System). Water flows and freezes, everything is deformable, cave-in’s are a thing if you’re not careful, all in a persistent shared MMO world. People harken back to Star Wars: Galaxies and Ultima Online, which is no shock, since they share a creator in Raph Koster, Playable Worlds ' CEO.
A moment from many weeks ago that kind of sums up the Stars Reach ‘Cellular Automata” sim system: Jesdyr "The Terrorformer" and his posse attempt to create a geyser accelerator by superheating a relay structure (first part of vid), and end up destroying a lake in the process :) hilarity ensues
The project has been in the works for years, but recently raised a pretty crazy Kickstarter. The team has ambitious plans in the same vein of those previous games: like building mechanics into atypical class specializations like Journalism, for instance, where articles like this one I’ve written for this website would garner me experience points in that skill tree in the game. Ambitious metatextual stuff, and the community is showing up for it. Wonder-ful.
LFG
If you go look at the LFG channel in the Stars Reach Discord now, you will see a bunch threads that feel a lot like those Ultima Online kitchen table strategy sessions I’d have with pals as a 13 year old: proposals for self-organizing utopian cities, trade federations, conservation orgs (shoutout GUNC), academic institutions, travel groups, hospitality unions, "space Romans," a "Space News Network" called C.U.E. (which I’m now a correspondent for), and it just goes and goes.
This game is still in Pre-Alpha testing. Most systems are just ideas currently. That hasn’t stopped the community from building entire wiki’s on the game’s mechanics, systems and lore. Fertile ground for wonder.
The Stars Reach LFG Discord channel now, full of big community plans for future versions of the game.
Ad Astra
I wrote previously about games like Stars Reach helping me unlearn some of my “knowledge” around player motivation, built over 20 odd years in “the industry.”
TLDR: Given that there are almost no buttressing systems in this game yet, it creates a pretty clear signal that those like GUNCIES Guild who come and create these big collaborative in-world projects seem to be doing so purely for the love of building together, and the desire for friction to overcome collectively, regardless of their extreme impermanence across planned server wipes.
Since I wrote that about a week ago, the servers were wiped yet again as planned, and GUNCIES Village was washed out to sea. All that hard work, down the drain (but they knew that would happen, as they knew it every time before that). Never mind that: in their Discord, they’re already planning their next magnum opus.
Two GUNC Guild members working on prototype sketches for their newest megastructure, in spite of (because of?) the fact that it will be washed away, like the last ones, in 2-3 weeks.
Then, just a couple days ago, on an entirely fresh test universe (on an entirely different planet no less), there they were again building an even more ambitious project: A cross between the Seattle Space Needle, The Black Sun Nightclub in Snow Crash, and the Great Pyramid at Giza.
This project is made all the more difficult by newly tweaked material adhesion values in the game’s physics system, requiring quite a bit more structural engineering, design, planning, prototyping etc. to prevent a collapse. On top of this, resource gathering and crafting has become more challenging, and requires a lot more functional cooperation between players to move at any kind of speed. That is to say: Rather than solve their problems or make their lives easier by introducing automation or A.I. whatever, the game is making it more challenging to accomplish this goal.
This is great game design 101, and is likely why capital G Games like Stars Reach (and not necessarily open-ended sandbox platforms without much of a thesis or structure) are the primary class of software with the most organic and clear rejection of AI slop: because it actually makes the experience measurably poorer (last Raph told me at GDC, the game had like an 8/10 NPS score). It’s simple product math: if the market won’t pay for your product, it’s not serving a need.
The need here is more friction, not less. Come on, the Guild’s name is GUNC. Spell it with me. It starts with a W_________.
A.I. Antihistamines
Why spend all this time and energy on such impermanent outputs? GUNC Guild member Jade and D’adi put it this way: “I personally think it’s the children building sandcastles inside all of us.”
Players in Stars Reach have radically embraced this transient set of worlds they’ve been given, wipe after server wipe, building their sand castles in spite of (because of?) the fact that the next wave will wash them all away. They’re imperfect, using imperfect tools, but most importantly bear the indelible signs of human-generated stuff.
What’s most interesting is that it also might tell us where AI may actually most organically fit into this human-in-the-loop scenario: all of this creation is literally underpinned by procedural generation systems; not as an AI builder-in-a-box, but as a simulation of friction. Dave Georgeson, the game’s director, recently told me that automation will play very little role in their systems design roadmap. It’s about creating healthy interreliance between humans. There’s something genuinely profound about this: a bunch of humans saying, no actually we want to need each other. Give us friction to overcome together. As Dr. Drake Vellaut from GUNC puts it “we are building our story together.”
The other theme I’m seeing these days with the advent of AI-generated-everything is that there is this growing hunger for the hand-made, the ephemeral; and I think there is something scratching an itch here even with wonder evoked by the communities of creators building these virtual melting cities; because, at the end of the day, their defining quality is their very human thumbprint.
Even the landscape of Stars Reach looks lived-in: over-mined areas are pockmarked like a World War I battlefield. Whole forests are stripped bare for their resources. Again, though, rather than automating some re-terraforming solution, the devs have kind of left it to the players to decide for themselves, as a community, whether they want to do something about this or not (for me, personally, I love seeing one of these heavily abused areas; they feel more like real places than the map design most games funnel us down).
Take note developers: build these opportunities for wonder into your products. In the constant crisis that is the Games Industry right now, this may very well be one of the legs you stand on.
Maybe products like Stars Reach, Atomontage and Viverse will be our cloth maps to that wonder, which never really left us to begin with.
Magincia Ho!
Matt Daly is an Austin-based product, business & marketing consultant in Games & Emerging Tech. He’s been trying to not lose wonder for ~20 years, has won some awards, made a lot of wonder-ful friends, helped sell a couple companies, has served on the SXSW Board for ~14 years, and is a hardcore Mexophile. Connect with him at www.mattda.ly
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